Bernard Dona MIKHAILBAKHTIN: BETWEEN PHENOMENOLOGY AND MARXISM Ls 1994

Mikhail Bakhtin: Between Phenomenology and Marxism
Author(s): Michael Bernard-Donals

Source: College English, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Feb., 1994), pp. 170-188
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
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170
MIKHAILBAKHTIN:
BETWEEN PHENOMENOLOGY
AND MARXISM
Michael Bernard-Donals
seventies and eighties. What characterized the industry in its earliest stages
was its exegetical task. Writers often stumbled upon Bakhtin and his various
writings, and sought to explain and relate their contents (see Morson, Bak-
htin: Essays and Dialogues on His Work; Shukman; Holquist, "The Politics of
Representation"; Booth). They found the task difficult because, as so many have
noted, there seem to be so many diverse strains, so many far-flung topics, and so
many different analytical tools. Moreover, there's the problem of the "disputed
texts," those books or articles which list Voloshinov and Medvedev as author but
which have been attributed at least in part to Bakhtin himself.
None of this is news. But what often goes unnoticed is that most (if not all)
of this writing about Bakhtin in some sense tries to "unify"his work under a single
rubric. Bialostosky and (from a different angle) Todorov give us the "dialogic"
Bakhtin; Morson and Emerson have lately given us the "prosaic"Bakhtin; Shep-
herd, Hirschkop, and White have given us the "marxist"Bakhtin; and Clark and
Holquist have given us what is probably the most popular version, the "architec-
tonic" Bakhtin. Even those works which treat the most subtle complexities-like
Morson and Emerson's, in which "prosaics" is comprised of Bakhtin's many
different attempts to understand the polyglot social dimension of language; or
Clark and Holquist's, in which architectonics relates the literary and the social as
a human event-ultimately subsumemost of Bakhtin's thinking under a totalizing
term, even if the subsumption takes the guise of "dialogizing" the body of
Bakhtin/Voloshinov/Medvedev's work.
Michael Bernard-Donals is an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri at

Columbia, where he teaches rhetorical and critical theory. His book on Bakhtin and contemporary
critical theory will be published next fall by Cambridge UP; he has written articles on Bakhtin, critical
theory, popular culture, and the teaching of writing.
COLLEGE ENGLISH, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 2, FEBRUARY 1994
BAKHTIN: BETWEEN PHENOMENOLOGYAND MARXISM 171
All of the people I have mentioned so far-and others-have a great deal of

difficulty in reconciling the various Bakhtins as one writer or one set of ideas.
Something is always left out (like Holquist's finessing the problems of authorship)
or glossed over (as in White's preliminary remarks on the hegemonic discourse
of the novel). In this paper I want to suggest that one of the reasons why these
"unifying"visions of Bakhtin will inevitably fail is because there are two dominant
and distinct-though by no means mutually exclusive-strains that run through
Bakhtin's work; that these strains account for some of the vastly different con-
cerns in that work; and that, because Bakhtin was never fully able to reconcile the
strains, theorists who try to do so will fall short of the task. Furthermore, the
ambivalence in Bakhtin's work suggests in microcosm an ambivalence that exists
in the larger arena of literary studies. With some recent examples I will suggest
how this ambivalence plays itself out.
The two principle theoretical poles in Bakhtin's work can be seen clearly as
early as 1924, during his debate with what was at the time orthodox Russian
Formalism. In fact, at any stage in Bakhtin'stheoretical development, one can see
at once two identifiable strands. One could be roughly identified as an outgrowth
of the neo-Kantian philosophy that was current in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, and that was developed in different forms by Husserlian
phenomenology. The other could be called "marxist"(though clearly not "ortho-
dox" marxism in any contemporary sense); it stresses the potentially liberatory
nature of language and was developed in close collaboration with Medvedev and
Voloshinov. Phenomenology and marxism are not mutually exclusive by any
means in contemporary critical thought; but, from the evidence available, Bakhtin
never made the connections explicit in his work.
The objects of knowledge for phenomenology and marxism differ in kind.
Phenomenology generally studies the ways in which individual human beings
come to cognition of objects. More specifically-as derived from the work of
Edmund Husserl and, later, Roman Ingarden-phenomenological studies suggest
how humans make aesthetic judgments about works of art. In following this
notion, Bakhtin proposes a human subject that is defined by its relation to other
subjects, and he explores the ways in which that relation is manifested in the
creation of language. The emphasis in this strand of Bakhtin's work falls on the
"shared, common purview" of the interlocutors in any situation, and its task is to
discover how signs are interiorized and subsequently reuttered by subjects based
on their position vis-a-vis one another.
Phenomenology deals with the construction and nature of individual human
consciousness. In contrast to this, marxism deals with the ways in which human
social formations are constructed, and the roles ideology plays in those construc-
tions. The marxist strand becomes apparent in Bakhtin in his examination of the
"characteristics" and "forms" of the social intercourse by which meaning is
172 COLLEGEENGLISH
realized. The emphasis in marxism is on analyzing subject-formation, but with a

specific focus on how language- and sign-production yield knowledge of subjects
and social formation.
Let me try to put one question aside at the beginning, the question of the
disputed texts, since these are the ones that are most explicitly marxist, in rhetoric
if not in content. Regardless of whether Bakthin was "anti-marxist,"as some have
asserted, and whether or not anyone can say for certain that he actually penned
Marxism and the Philosophyof Language and The Formal Method in Literary Schol-
arship (a question Bakhtin cagily left unanswered in the years before his death),
the fact remains that in all of Bakhtin's work there exists a philosophical strain
that insists on the relationship between the materiality of the social order and the
language uttered by those who live in it, and a question of how the social whole
is formed not only by language as a material force but also by other material-ideo-
logical forces. This is evident not only in the "disputed" texts, but also in such
undisputed works as "Discourse in the Novel," "From the Prehistory of Novelis-
tic Discourse," the book on Dostoevsky, and the extant chapter (on the
Bildungsroman) of the book on realism. Bakhtin may very well have been hostile
to the monologism that Stalin and Zhdanovite apparatchiks used to organize
post-revolutionary Russia under the name of "marxism,"but this cannot be used
as evidence to dispute the theoretical sociological marxism that concerned him
and was part of his work from the beginning.
The two strands in Bakhtin's work mirror, in microcosm, divisions in the
literary academy. The primary division is one between theories that hold access
to material conditions as possible (roughly equivalent to Bakhtin's "marxist"
position), and those that dismiss questions of access as fruitless and best left alone
(roughly equivalent to his "phenomenological" position). The latter, like Richard
Rorty's (to mention only one), hold that we cannot have access to "scientific"
knowledge, because that knowledge is attainable only linguistically; since lan-
guage is boundless, so must science be (see Philosophyand the Mirror of Nature and
Contingency,Ironyand Solidarity;for rebuttals, see Bhaskar,Livingston). It is better
to suggest unscientific ways of knowing, like hermeneutics, with which human
beings can recontextualize or reimagine their material situation without having
to bang their heads against an epistemological wall. Closing off epistemology
generates the fear, "if there is no categorically right or wrong answer, then anyone
can provide any interpretation at all, and there are some frightening interpreta-
tions out there." The response suggested by the same theory is, "true enough, but
that's all we have recourse to."
Marxist theories say that such a response is wrong. Certainly it is true that
context is potentially boundless and that almost anything goes when it comes to
interpretation. But this doesn't mean that everything that goes is all well and
good. In order to discover which interpretations are better and which ones are
BAKHTIN: BETWEEN PHENOMENOLOGYAND MARXISM 1 73
worse, we must ask questions about materiality, and in doing so we must have
recourse to rigorous scientific analysis. It may be, in an example brought up
repeatedly in my writing courses (primarily by men), that Clarence Thomas's
remarks to Anita Hill while the two of them worked at the EEOC were meant as
harmless banter and should not have been considered harassment. But saying this
doesn't make it so, nor does it make it right. One needs rather to understand not
only the ways in which language carries with it certain material "baggage" and
can be interiorized to include that baggage, but also that such language intervenes
in subjects' (read here Anita Hill's) lived relations to their material conditions of
existence, and that it works to change those conditions themselves; and one needs
to consider whether such material change is for the better or the worse.
At this point, I want to lay out the ambivalence of Bakhtin'sposition between
phenomenology and marxism, and in the essay's final section I want to suggest
how this ambivalence plays itself out in issues that have come up in some of my
writing classes, issues that illustrate an ambivalence in the way we approach
literary studies generally.
I. MARXISM
The fourth chapter of The Formal Method of Literary Scholarshipis firmly within
the marxist paradigm when Bakhtin/Medvedev challenges the achievement of
Formalism in Russia. Boris Eikenbaum's analysis of problems with contemporary
scholarship is quoted with approval:
"Academic"scholarship,having completely ignored theoretical problems and
sluggishlymadeuse of outmodedesthetic,psychological,and historical"axioms,"
had by the time of the formalists'debutso completelylost contactwith the actual
object of researchthat its very existencehad become phantasmal.(55-56)
Bakhtin/Medvedev praises Formalism for having brought literary scholarship
back into contact with literary texts, which it had often ignored, and for having
raised the level of discourse in literary studies to a degree it had not attained
earlier in Russia. But Bakhtin places more emphasis on the problems with For-
malism than on its merits, and one of the greatest of these problems is that
Formalism, in its "struggle against idealist detachment of meaning from material
... negate[d] ideological meaning itself. As a result the problem of the concrete
materialized meaning, the meaning-object, was not raised, and in its place we find
the mere object, which is not quite a natural body, and not quite a product for
individual consumption" (64). Formalism, having concentrated on "the device"
which would make a work "literary,"overlooks what kind of ideological material
was used to construct it in the first place. Bakhtin/Medvedev concludes that if the
Formalists were led to "show the significance of constructive devices by putting
174 COLLEGEENGLISH
'everything else to the side as motivation,' then it is now absolutely necessary to

return all this 'everything else,' i.e., all the richness and depth of ideological
meaning, to the foreground of research" (65). Certainly, suggests Bakhtin/Med-
vedev, "It is necessary to be able to isolate the object of study and correctly
establish its boundaries," in such a way that they "do not sever the object from
vital connections with other objects, connections without which it becomes un-
intelligible" (77). Bakhtin/Medvedev established early on that literary works are
works of ideological creation: they are material things because they are con-
structed linguistically, and language is part and parcel of the ideological material
that surrounds-and creates-human beings (7).
The point here is that poetic language is only one aspect of language in
general. Moreover, linguistic study of poetry-or any literary object-is only one
method. Though a work's construction may serve to define it as literary or
nonliterary, any utterance may be constructed in the same way, and may also be
seen, in certain cases, as aesthetic or not aesthetic. Formalism's "error" was to
have separated aesthetic objects from all other utterances, and to have studied
only the former. All definitions-aesthetic, nonaesthetic, strange, everyday-
"only pertain to the organization of the utterance and work in their connectionwith
thefunctions theyfulfill in the unity of sociallife and, in particular, in the concrete
unity of the ideological horizon" (84; emphasis added).
To put it simply, what is missing from the Formalists' conception of language
is history, a way to discuss how concrete social conditions construct the work at
the time and place of the "unique act of its realization, becoming a historical
phenomenon" (120). To understand language historically, one needs to undertake
an analysis of the particular time and place of an utterance's generation, as well as
an analysis of the individuals engaged in a given discourse. This social evaluation
"actualizes the utterance both from the standpoint of its factual presence and the
standpoint of its semantic meaning," going beyond "the word, grammatical form,
sentence, and all linguistic definiteness taken in general abstraction from the
concrete historical utterance" (121). It defines the "choice of subject, word, form,
and their individual combination within the bounds of the given utterance. It also
defines the choice of content, the selection of form, and the connection between
form and content" (121). Certainly, suggests Bakhtin/Medvedev, this kind of
analysis is not solely the province of aesthetics; nevertheless, complete aesthetic
analysis cannot do without such a social evaluation. The deeper and more fruitful
social evaluations study "those direct changes in the [social] relation itself that
also determine" the utterance and its form (DialogicImagination7). "One may say
that the major historical aims of a whole epoch in the life of the given social group
are formed in these evaluations" (FormalMethod 121).
Formalism misunderstands what the poet herself does. She does not choose
linguistic forms-or poetic devices-but rather she "selects, combines, and ar-
BAKHTIN: BETWEEN PHENOMENOLOGY AND MARXISM 175
ranges the evaluations lodged in [those forms] as well. And the resistance of the
material we feel in every poetic work"-what Formalism in some cases might call
estrangement--"is in fact the resistance of the social evaluations it contains"
(123). In "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse," Bakhtin notes that
different social groups-the peasantry, royalty, merchants-each have at their
disposal the same language-material with the same lexicon, morphology, syntax,
and so on, and each has a different relation to the "national language" and the
potential "centralizing" effect of the material "social and ideological struggle"
(67-8). In The FormalMethod, Bakhtin/Medvedev goes on to say that, as such,
the intonationof one and the same word will differprofoundlybetween groups;
within the very same grammaticalconstructionsthe semanticand stylisticcombi-
nations will be profoundly different. One and the same word will occupy a
completelydifferenthierarchicalplace in the utteranceas a concrete social act.
(123)
Each group lives under a different set of material conditions in the social hierar-
chy.
Think about what happens when two students in one of your classes, each a
member of a distinct social class, read a report in the Sunday paper about Federal
funding of abortion clinics. One student, from a working class family, whose
parents never went to college, feels very strongly about "family values" and the
life of the unborn. The other, from an upper class family, whose parents went to
college and who herself hopes to work for General Motors, has begun to sub-
scribe to the philosophy that governments should not interfere in personal and
business decisions. In reading such a report in the same edition of the same paper
(assuming that they both subscribe to the same paper, which might not be the
case), each might have a very different reaction, and may in turn have quite
different things to say. What is important here is not what each will say, but that
a social evaluation is necessary to be able to say something about the language of
the text each is reading. (Similarly divergent reading occurs with poetry, as
evidenced every day in my literature classes.) Moreover, this kind of analysis
shows that what is at stake, both in theory and in garden-variety classroom
situations, is not necessarily the nature of the language of the text. What is more
important is the way language functions differently for different groups, and the
different ideological material that goes into the judgments each has about given
utterances.
Formalism initially undervalued the fact that all utterances are part of a
broad and complex social discourse (what in a different context Michel Pacheux
calls "interdiscourse") in which language plays an integral part. Poetic texts are
part of such discourse, though they may be defined as a separate genre of
utterance. Moreover, poetic utterances, as part of discourse, come into contact-
since both the author and the reader of such utterances are part of the social
176 COLLEGE ENGLISH
discourse-with extra-aesthetic language. This is the primary rule for Bakhtin

(and Bakhtin/Medvedev): all language is part of the ideological material with
which humans make decisions about the world. And this gives literary scholars a
way to make decisions about how literary language diverges from "everyday"
language but is at the same time affected by it. It provides access to the poetic
utterance in a way that Formalism arrived at only later.
II. PHENOMENOLOGY
The second strand of Bakhtin's thinking, phenomenology, is also visible in his

first encounter with the Formalists. In fact, some scholars see an early essay, "The
Problem of Content, Material and Form," in which he addresses the Formalists
directly, as an early version of The Formal Method (see Clark and Holquist 189).
Both works try to specify the role of material content in a work (that is, the
social/ideological language that is manipulated to create a verbal construct). But
the essay forgoes a discussion (taken up in The Formal Method) of how language
in general, and aesthetic language in particular, could be studied by examining
how social intercourse is determined by material constraints. The essay instead
stresses the ways in which individual human subjects come to perceive aesthetic
objects.
What leads Formalism into confused notions of the nature of language and
the construction of the aesthetic object is "an incorrect or, at best, a methodologi-
cally indeterminate relationship between the poetics they are constructing and
general, systematic, philosophical aesthetics" ("The Problem of Content" 258).
Bakhtin puts it this way:
without a systematicconceptof the aestheticin its distinctnessfrom the cognitive
and the ethicalas well as in its interconnectednesswithin the unity of culture,it is
impossibleeven to isolate the object to be studiedby poetics (the worksof verbal
art) from the massof verbalworksof other kinds.(259)
Isolating the individual object of study, of course, was what occupied the Formal-
ists in their earliest incarnation. In order to systematize the study of the aesthetic
object, Bakhtin suggests that literary scholars should start from the beginning and
create "an aesthetics of artistic verbal creation" (260).
What is needed, suggests Bakhtin, is a more accurate definition of the
material used in artistic creation. Aesthetic creations are collections of material-
not simply language-organized by the artist toward some intention. Bakhtin uses
the image of a sculptor: certainly the sculptor is working with material-a chunk
of marble-but it is not the marble that is important in defining the statue as
aesthetic, nor in understanding how the sculptor or the contemplator have cog-
nition of that statue. Rather,
BAKHTIN: BETWEEN PHENOMENOLOGY AND MARXISM 1 77
the sculpturalformcreatedis an aesthetically

validformof manandhisbody:it is in
this directionthat the intentionof creationand contemplationproceeds,whereas
the artist'sand the contemplator'srelationshipto the marble as a determinate
physical body has a secondary,derivativecharacter,governed by some sort of
primaryrelationshipto objectivevalues-in the given case, to the valueof corpo-
real man. (265)
The marble shape of the human form is the "external work"; the aesthetic object
is the totality of the material and the intentional activity directed toward the
work, including cognition and creation. The Formalist equation of literary study
leaves out (1) the noncoincidence of the aesthetic object with the material that is
used to produce that object, and (2) the corresponding noncoincidence of the
contemplators' and creator's intention toward such an aesthetic object with their
intention toward the material. What is accessible to Formalism-what Bakhtin
here calls a "material aesthetics"-is "the second of the tasks of aesthetic analy-
sis." The first task is the aesthetic study of the distinct nature of a given work and
its structure, or a work's "consummation," which Bakhtin calls its "architecton-
ics." The second task is "the study of a work as an object of natural science or
linguistics," or the "composition" of a work (267-68). To give just one example
of the difference between the architectonic and the compositional, "Drama is a
compositional form (dialogue, division into acts, etc.) but the tragic and comicare
architectonic forms of consummation" (269). "Architectonic forms are forms of
the inner and bodily value of aesthetic man, they are forms of nature-as his
environment, forms of the event in his individual-experiential, social, and histori-
cal dimensions, and so on. They all are achievements, actualizations are
.... They
forms of aesthetic being in its distinctiveness" (270).
The "aesthetic vision outsideof art" will occupy Bakhtin in the longest of his
early essays, "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity," one of the most thoroughly
"phenomenological" texts in the Bakhtin canon (see Godzich). What unifies
aesthetic activity both within the realm of art and outside it is the act of human
cognition, the study of which the Formalists ignored. For Bakhtin there are three
aspects to human aesthetic activity. The first of these is cognition, which is the
act of finding reality "alreadyorganized in the concepts of prescientific thinking"
(275). Cognition finds these objects without regard to axiological relations to
other human beings or, for that matter, to any action that might be taken as a
result of recognizing objects' organization. Such organized knowledge, as in the
Husserlian idea of cognition, refers to "essences," those concepts that are univer-
sal from human mind to human mind. The second aspect of activity is the ethical,
which encompasses the range of actions that can be taken in response to the
cognitive understanding of some event or object. Bakhtin suggests that "it is
usually expressed as the relationof the ought to reality"(278), but does not elaborate.
The third aspect is the aesthetic, which actualizes the cognitive understanding
178 COLLEGE ENGLISH
and the ethical action into a consummation of the two. In a sense, the aesthetic
activity of humans gives form or shape to the cognitive/ethical unity by transpos-
ing the identified and evaluated reality "to another axiological level, subordi-
nat[ing] it to a new unity and order[ing] it in a new way: it individualizes,
concretizes, isolates, and consummates it, but doesnot alter thefact that this reality
has beenidentifiedand evaluated,and it is precisely toward this prior identification
and evaluation that the consummating aesthetic form is directed" (278). To put
this another way, aesthetic consummation completes cognitive and ethical aspects
of an object by placing those aspects into relation with the individual human
subject, the acting consciousness. In the example of the newspaper report on
Federal funding for abortion, consummation would occur between the reading of
the article and the action the two students would take in response, and it would
consist of the interiorization of the language of the article with the languages
already interiorized by the students-in one case (to oversimplify), the language
of laissez faire capitalism, in the other (again to oversimplify), the language of the
religious right.
Bakhtin notes that the principal result of Formalism's lack of a theory of
general aesthetics is a confusion in defining the term "content." Thus it becomes
difficult to distinguish between the material of the object (that is, the language of
the newspaper report) and the object's content (that is, the depiction of material
reality in a work, a depiction of which humans can have cognition, but which is
not immediately coincident with language). One has to distinguish clearly be-
tween the cognitive ethical moment of an aesthetic object-which for Bakhtin is
defined as content, "a constitutive moment in a given aesthetic object" (285)-and
judgments and ethical assessments that one can construct in order to say some-
thing about content. These latter assessments of and utterances about the content
of the object are not part of the aesthetic object. Moreover, content-which is
devoid of the aesthetic consummating activity of the perceiver or of the author-
can be talked about separately from the aesthetic object, since it is not related
axiologically to the perceiver or author. Content is paraphrasable;the (aesthetic)
object is not. Similarly, ideological material is also paraphrasableand analyzable;
the aesthetic object is not.
But in suggesting that ideological material is paraphrasable and analyzable
but that the aesthetic object is not-at least on the same terms-we have pin-
pointed the crux of the problem for Bakhtin's body of work. The materialist
or "marxist" component of his work, in which he discusses the ways in which
various languages come into contact and reveal difficulties and contradictions in
verbal (and other) ideological material ("Discourse in the Novel," "From the
Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse," and the Dostoevsky book), seems to be at
odds with the phenomenological component, in which he discusses the individual
subject-relations that construct utterances (the essays in Art and Answerabilityand
those in SpeechGenres).Certainly one would think that the two are compatible: if
one simply extrapolates Bakhtin'swork on individual subject relations and cogni-
tion to his works on broader social relations constructed by and with language,
one can conceivably build a unified and consistent Bakhtinian language theory.
And there are those that have tried to do just that.
But when one looks a bit closer, one finds that this kind of extrapolation is
not as simple as it looks. The most notable problem is the disjunction between
the way in which language functions as ideological material to form human
beings-an idea that is present both in the "phenomenological" and the "marxist"
work-and the importance of the real material conditions of existence of human
subjects individually and as social entities. In "The Problem of Content" Bakhtin
goes a long way toward proposing how human mental activity can "aestheticize"
everyday activities, what Michael Holquist calls "the work we all as men do, the
work of answering and authoring the text of our social and physical universe"
("Answering as Authoring" 70). Bakhtin goes on to suggest, in "Author and
Hero," how human subjects are constructed by their interiorization and sub-
sequent reuttering of language, a process that is similar in many ways to "pheno-
menological" and subsequent reception-oriented aesthetic theories (see especially
Shepherd; Stewart). But "answering and authoring" our social and physical uni-
verse (for instance, "reacting"to a report on abortion funding) is a different order
of activity altogether from changing it materially. Though Bakhtin has pinpointed
the problem the Formalists had in confusing content and material (that is, ideo-
logical material in a text and the language in that work), he makes a similar error
in failing to distinguish adequately between language (which is ideological mate-
rial) and ideological material in general.
Those who would unify Bakhtin's work into a holistic philosophy of language
make the same error by conflating language and ideological material. You can go
along with the idea that the interiorization and dialogized reutterance of language
can change human cognition, but this change doesn't automatically lead to a
change in the material conditions of existence for the human subjects whose
cognition has changed. It is one thing, for example, for a student to dialogize the
term "poverty," but it is altogether another to be able to dialogize the student's
material condition of poverty into the material condition of plenty. My students
and I may understand the contradictory aspects of the Bush administration's
analysis of the riots in south-central L. A. in May 1992, and as a result understand
better the problems of the underclass and the complexity of racial conflict there.
But this does not mean that our new understanding can lead to material change
in L. A. without the intervention of praxis, which-in historical materialist the-
ory-is a hugely problematic term (see my essay "Rodney King... "). Bakhtin's
encounter with the Formalists placed him in a difficult position. On the one hand,
he attempted to construct a philosophy of language that would suggest ways in
180 COLLEGE ENGLISH
which the utterance would not be divorced from the verbal aesthetic object. On
the other, he had to suggest a way in which the aesthetic nature of such an object
could be studied in relation to the human faculty of cognition. Bakhtin/Medvedev
accomplished the former by suggesting that one's material conditions have much
to do with one's understanding of any utterance, in a sense beginning to construct
a materialist theory of social construction. Bakhtin accomplished the latter by
centering his theory of general aesthetics around a theory of cognition, in a sense
beginning to construct a philosophy of language.
III. LITERARY STUDIES
But is it really so simple to move from one theory, broadly construed as pheno-
menological, that explores how humans come into contact with language (particu-
larly aesthetic language) through a process of "interiorization," to another theory,
broadly construed as materialist, that understands language as material and that
has as its aim social progress? Can literary study, by looking at the ambivalences
in Mikhail Bakhtin'sphilosophy of language as an example, find a way to negotiate
those ambivalences in order to come to terms with its own difficulties? In the end,
I will suggest that the answer to this question is no; but I will also suggest that
reconciling what is present in Bakhtin's work may not be as important as under-
standing what is missing.
Let me go back to the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas example to frame the
problem. As my students asked (and still ask), how can you tell whose "interpre-
tation" of the events that took place at the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission between Hill and Thomas is closer to the material events them-
selves? (Or, to ask another question that has come up in my classes, how can you
tell whether anything happened at all?) It's like the conundrum in philosophy
classes: if a tree falls in the forest, but you are not there to hear or see it, how do
you know anything about it? The answer to this question is, you talk to someone
who did hear or see it fall. Or better still, you listen to someone who has seen the
event, and then go out to the forest and look for the turned-over stump. In the
case of Anita Hill's testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on her harass-
ment by Thomas, all you have to go on is the testimony. You can get people up
to testify in support of Hill or Thomas, to consider whether it makes sense that
Hill would wait to tell of the harassment, or to argue whether someone of the
Judge's "character"would "do such a thing" as talk about pornographic films or
ask about Hill's sexual preferences. But all there is to go on is language, language
played against the background of signs previously interiorized within various
interpretive communities (those of the Senators, of the C-SPAN audience, and of
me and my students).
This is an epistemologicalproblem:by simply askingquestionsthat are by

naturelinguistic-asking someone to "tell"you whether they were harassed,or
whetherthey saw a tree fall in the forest-we havenot ascertainedthe natureof
the event'smateriality.When I tell someone else that a tree has fallen or that
someone has harassedme, this knowledgeis inscribedlinguistically:I can con-
struct the "context"with the language I choose to use, and the listener also
reconstructsthat context accordingto what he knows.We constructand recon-
struct,but the event is over, and I'm the only one who had accessto it. Though
it happened,there'sno way to communicateit withoutresortingto the potential
boundlessnessof language.
IV. BETWEEN PHENOMENOLOGY AND MARXISM
We can addressthis problemin two ways, each of which in turn addressesthe

tension I have pointed to in Bakhtin'swork and, more broadly,in the academy.
The first of these, because it rests on the assumptionthat there's a way to
reconcile the phenomenologicaland the materialistBakhtins(and the pheno-
menological/hermeneuticand materialisttendenciesin the academy),is insuffi-
cient. One might call it the "philosophyof language"resolution,and it goes as
follows. While certainlynot denying the existenceof extralinguisticevents (ob-
jective phenomena), Bakhtin doesquestion the possibility that we can create
knowledgeof those events extralinguistically. The problemruns along the lines
of the question which is perenniallyposed by marxism:(how) is it possible to
createscientificknowledgeof the materialforcesof productionwhen all we have
to work with is language,and when this language(at least for Bakhtin,and it
would seem for theorists like Michel Pecheux and Louis Althusseras well) is
specificallyideological?Science is seen as the way subjectsgain knowledge of
materialexistence(Althusser271); but since subjectsonly haveaccessto material
through language,how can we have such knowledgewithoutletting ideological
concernscreep in?
For Pecheux and for Bakhtin,at least, the answeris that we can't.We can
"dialogize"language in such a way as to discern its ideological baggage, its
"previouslife" as it were. But this doesn'tlet those who perceivethis ideological
bind escapethe bind itself. Bakhtin,like Michel Pecheux,notes that by recogniz-
ing their placementin materialreality,subjectsrecognizethat placementas social
placement, and can work from inside it (see also Fish 141-61, 315-41; Bak-
htin/Voloshinov 11, 19-24). There are extralinguistic phenomena-the forces of
history, the workings of the economy, planetary motion and gravity, thermody-
namics and so on-but we can't know how they work objectively. (This differs
from Althusser's formulation, which claims that there can be scientific knowledge
182 COLLEGE ENGLISH
of these forces.) We know that trees fall silently in forests somewhere, or that
people are sexually harassed on the job, but we can't know anything about these
events unlesswe actually talk to someone who was there-which communications
are acts of language-or unless we are able to view the material results of such
events (and again, we understand these results linguistically). For Pecheux, as
for Bakhtin, scientific knowledge is the knowledge gained of an event and also
the understanding that this very knowledge is ideologically formulated. That is,
we understand an event, but we also understand that our knowledge is interested
in a particular way. And all of this takes place at the level of language. But
this knowledge doesn'tlet us out of our placement in that interested language,
since there's always some other sign-relation that potentially draws us back
into the ideological bind. We may have thought that our "dispassionate" obser-
vation of the Judiciary Committee hearings would lead us-and eventually
our representatives in Congress-to weigh the material results of sexual harass-
ment and thus come to some conclusions about the suitability of Clarence
Thomas to sit on the Supreme Court. But at the very moment we understand
"dispassionate" observation as a way of "escaping" the ideological baggage
each Committee member uses in evaluating verbal material (not to mention our
own ideological baggage in such an evaluation), we understand that the very
notion of "escape" signals that we're not free of the ideology of inside/outside,
which is at play in the issue of whether Hill was harassed, and so on. (And, after
all, Thomas now sits on the bench, the question of his harassment of Hill
notwithstanding.)
But this doesn't really matter, since what I am (and members of my writing
classes are) doing is, in effect, placing even the possibility that Thomas harassed
Hill into dialogue. I am making somethingof it-I am making some "other" lan-
guage, making my self into a "new" self. I am "inventing" language (sign-rela-
tions) out of previously uttered language in such a way as to make the possibility
of Hill's harassment real. I am (we are) taking eduated guesses about ("authoring"
or reorienting) an event in such a way as to create something new and potential.
This is, however, no guarantee that the newly created "potential" (created by the
likes of Senator Orrin Hatch) won't also suggest that Hill read The Exorcistand
"dialogized" its language with language she heard in the office; and thus will
"re-create" an Anita Hill who is a troubled, jilted lover who would do anything
to bring a Supreme Court Justice down. The potential object isn't necessarily
close to the real object of knowledge.
This is in accord with the kind of multivalence of potential Bakhtin con-
structed in his schema of "monologue" and "dialogue" in "From the Prehistory
of Novelistic Discourse" (66, 67). At the moment language might be "dialogized,"
there is always a centripetal force of monologism at work that counters that
language and that might "deaden" or "de-socialize" it. Bakhtin gives no guaran-
tees of "progress"in the way language works to create and reorient selves. To cite
an example I have used before, one cannot dialogize poverty into plenty; what one
can do is reorient language in such a way as to discern one's ideological place-
ment. This does not put food on the table, nor does it guarantee that anything
one does based on new knowledge of poverty-change jobs, join a demonstration,
take up arms, whatever-will lead to improvement in one's extra-ideological or
extralinguistic material conditions. But it does effectively lead to change in the
ideological material of one's life-language-which, for Bakhtin at least, comprises
the real social world.
As for the value of studying literary language, this solution suggests that
Bakhtin did not seek to repudiate the existence of objective phenomena that occur
outside linguistic understanding of them. Rather, his problem-particularly with
Formalism in Russia-was with categorical divisions between what goes on in
"art"and what goes on in "life," divisions between the aesthetic/linguistic and the
practical/political worlds. Bakhtin in effect blurs this distinction. More recent
theoretical attempts to deal with the aesthetic's articulation with the real maintain
just such a distinction (see Shepherd). In order to bridge the gap between the two
realms-objective and subjective, real and imaginary, scientific and ideological-
we are told that literature allows a glimpse into the way "life" functions. Yet one
would think that, in view of the recent history of literary studies, this distinc-
tion-and the prizing of literature and literary analysis as a way to dissolve the
distinction-is clearly unsustainable.
In the end, this reduces literary studies and analysis to "ways of reading" or
of experiencing the world, as Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty propose. Subjective
reading is a way to see how social conflict is set up, but it does not offer social
praxis as a solution (or even as an exacerbation) of such a conflict (see Fish
141-61), since without some way to see how ideological struggle is linked to real
social struggle, negotiation simply reasserts the terms of the conflict, and social
change is thus impossible. We can never agree on meaning, since there is nothing
outside subjective, community decisions, and these decisions are what inform the
judgments of critics (both literary and social).
This is not a problem if all we're talking about is how subjects read and
interpret texts. Any negotiation I may engage in about the reading of a particular
text may or may not be felicitous, but in the end the stakes are fairly low: it really
doesn't matter much who is right. But consider the current climate in academia:
the conservative right holds that cultural studies and pluralism are a threat to the
canon of great works, and will eventually fragment culture and dispossess Anglo-
Europeans of their heritage. Those on the left hold that cultural studies and
pluralism have been a long time coming in educational institutions that have
ignored the achievements of women, homosexuals, and people of color (among
others), and that resistance to change is tantamount to Eurocentric racism. If
184 COLLEGE ENGLISH
"understanding is a response to a sign with signs," and if we can consider the

divergence in readings current in the academy as a divergence in ideological
representations of culture and its canon, then "moving from sign to sign and then
to a new sign" (Marxism and the Philosophyof Language 11) (or moving from
ideological representation to another and yet another) is by definition an endless
process, and nowhere is there a way to decide which representation makes more
sense than any other. The stakes in the debate currently running in academe are
high-who teaches what to whom and, as a result of that teaching, whose version
of reality holds sway and determines others' versions-but Bakhtinian language
theory, mired as it is between phenomenological concerns and material ones, has
no way to resolve ideological disjunctions save through negotiation. Further,
given Bakhtin's fear that language can lapse into monologism, linguistic negotia-
tion may well be superseded by legislation or some other (perhaps more heavy-
handed) extralinguistic force.
This, clearly, is not the kind of revolutionary change that some hope literary
studies and literary theory in particular will enable. As I have said, by changing
language, one does not change a language-using subject's material placement.
Moreover, Bakhtin provides no useful models for the kind of analysis that
produces social change (see White). He lays the groundwork for analysis of
literary aesthetic objects (in Art and Answerability,the Dostoevsky and Rabelais
books, and The Dialogic Imagination), and he points to how such analyses might
lead to useful models of social movement (in Marxism and the Philosophyof
Languageand The FormalMethod).Yet the work of linking the ideological material
in literature to the material which forms the subjects who read and write it is
never fully done.
The phenomenological version of Bakhtin's language theory suggests that it
is virtually impossible to have access to the material conditions of language, since
those material conditions are embedded linguistically. Discarding epistemological
questions is one way to avoid this difficulty, but in the end it exchanges the
problem of the possibility of knowledge for the problem of the value of the
contingent (hermeneutic) knowledge that results. It is difficult-if not impossible,
if you listen to Fish, Rorty and "the phenomenological Bakhtin"-to have access
to certain knowledge: if it is approachable at all, it certainly is not approachable
linguistically. But the contingent knowledge left over, since it's contingent,
doesn't satisfactorily answer questions like "How do we know that racist readings
of certain laws aren't productive?" or "Is it really sexual harassment if a man talks
about his penis in front of women co-workers?" or "Do we really know that it's a
problem when we exclude women or people of color or homosexuals from the
literary canon?" Though our common sense tells us that racism and sexism are
materially harmful, we have no way to suggest how such readings can be changed,
or how the material circumstances that produce those readings can be replaced.
V. TOWARD A RESOLUTION
There is another way of looking at the question of the availability of knowledge.

I should note, though, that this proposal is derivedfrom the work of Bakhtin, but
cannot be said to be culled directly from his work, and this is the result of his
inability to relinquish phenomenology. I am not suggesting here that, had only
Bakhtin given up on the neo-Kantian beginnings of his work, he would have been
able to construct a more complete materialist theory of language that avoided the
problems that arise when you eliminate epistemology. I am suggesting that, in
giving up on epistemology and claiming a never-ending process of subject- and
text-production, you replace one difficulty (the problem of how you can have
access to material conditions) with another, namely, that one is never able to tell
whether one reading is definitively any better than any other.
Though it is the materialism of Bakhtin that is most productive of a workable
language theory, this materialism is dependent in large part upon his pheno-
menological starting point, because it is precisely this starting point that suggests
that there are two different kinds of knowledge: the certain and the contingent.
Phenomenology suggests that contingent knowledge is available only through
hermeneutics; the certain is available through science. The two realms in this
model are not compatible: scientists do science, readers do hermeneutics. What
materialism suggests is that the two realms are not incompatible at all (see
Bhaskar, especially 11-26). In fact, both provide access to the same world, but in
different ways and through different mediums: science tests observable data
through repeatable procedures, while hermeneutics examines contingent infor-
mation in unique situations.
The glaring deficiency in Bakhtin's work-other than the tensions between
phenomenology and marxism-is that the materialism presented in the co-
authored texts is far from fleshed out. But I do want to recover from his work a
certain kind of materialism which rests on the notion that there exist two realms
of knowledge, the demonstrable (the realm of science or "brute material fact")
and the probable (the realm of rhetoric), and that these realms are relatively
autonomous. Bakhtin asserts that language is a material fact, and as such it
constructs subjects as much as it constructs meaning. Language is as much part
of the constraining physical world as it is a tool through which subjects build the
boundless context of utterance. In this way, language affects one's material con-
ditions in a very real sense, since language is part of those very conditions.
This last principle is one on which Bakhtin builds his notion of subjectivity
(Marxism and the Philosophyof Language 9). Though Bakhtin claims that all
knowledge is in fact context-bound (in Stanley Fish's terms, contingent), he
does not dismiss it as biased and therefore intrinsically untrustworthy (as
Fish does to some extent), but rather sets up a way to see how such knowledge
186 COLLEGE ENGLISH
is formed. He does this by suggesting that one must inquire into the material
histories of those binding contexts by setting up a way to see how subjects are
formed in language.
For Bakhtin, there does exist a mind-independent reality in the history of the
utterance-its social construction. Yet the knowledge we gain from it is not
axiomatic, since it is mediated by linguistic inscription. One can see this in
Bakhtin'ssuggestion that literary analysis-and by this I understand, by extension,
any linguistic analysis-is "one of the branches" of the study of ideologies (The
FormalMethod 3), and that it operates similarly to science. Nevertheless, there are
scientific methods of analysis for nonlinguistic (nonrhetorical, that is empirical)
phenomena; these methods function rhetorically, since they are always already
embedded in ideological constructions. Scientific knowledge is proximate: we
develop methods that describe a given phenomenon better and better insofar as
possible. "Rhetorical" or mediated knowledge is per se ideological. It is material,
yet it is explicitly context-bound, both materially and linguistically constructed.
In a sense, then, for Bakhtin utterances require two levels of inquiry, whereas
observable, scientific data require only one. One must perform a linguistic (i.e.,
ideological or rhetorical) analysis of the utterance itself (somewhat like Mailloux's
rhetorical hermeneutics) and the "history of its baggage"; one must also try to
reproduce the proximate knowledge of the material constructionof the utterance
in addition to its social context (see Formal Method 18), and part of this work is
the discernment of subject placement and construction. It may well be that the
stories told by Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas are in the end irreconcilable, and
that anyone's "take" on those stories is just as supportable as anyone else's. But
the material circumstances from which the stories derived must also be examined,
and it is these material circumstances-the possibility that Thomas had the power
and the opportunity to make the remarks he reportedly made; the possibility that
Hill may have gained materially from her allegations, or that she may not have
initially reported her harassment for real, psychologically provable reasons-
which are often left out of the discussions of whom to believe that I have been
party to in the writing classroom.
What I am suggesting, finally, is the need for a theory that understands the
value of approximating the material conditions of existence (that is, a materialist
or scientific epistemology) while still understanding the elusive nature of the
language with which we do the approximating. Returning to the Bakhtinian
microcosm, though Bakhtin himself never did theorize a materialism in which
linguistic ideological material could change the material conditions of existence
(that is, in which reading could "change your life") and though Bakhtin's pheno-
menological texts do not successfully theorize aesthetic consummation's link to
the material constraints of the subject, I am also suggesting that we nevertheless
need a way to understand the complexity and contradiction inherent in Bakhtin's
position between phenomenology and marxism.
Those who want to organize Bakhtin'sthinking along either phenomenologi-

cal or materialist lines will fail because Bakhtin simply did not do the work
required to unify them. Calls to "dialogize" his work inevitably take one of the
lines as central and relegate the other to a less significant role. Understanding the
ways in which Bakhtin's work is both phenomenological and materialist might
force those of us who work with his theory to understand that it is fraught with
tensions, and that to see how Bakhtin'swork is useful for contemporary theory we
need not to try to unify his work, but to understand its implicit contradictions.
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Mikhail Bakhtin: Between Phenomenology and Marxism

Author(s): Michael Bernard-Donals

Michael Bernard-Donals is an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri at

COLLEGE ENGLISH, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 2, FEBRUARY 1994

All of the people I have mentioned so far-and others-have a great deal of

realized. The emphasis in marxism is on analyzing subject-formation, but with a

'everything else to the side as motivation,' then it is now absolutely necessary to

discourse-with extra-aesthetic language. This is the primary rule for Bakhtin

The second strand of Bakhtin's thinking, phenomenology, is also visible in his

the sculpturalformcreatedis an aesthetically

III. LITERARY STUDIES

This is an epistemologicalproblem:by simply askingquestionsthat are by

IV. BETWEEN PHENOMENOLOGY AND MARXISM

We can addressthis problemin two ways, each of which in turn addressesthe

"understanding is a response to a sign with signs," and if we can consider the

There is another way of looking at the question of the availability of knowledge.

Those who want to organize Bakhtin'sthinking along either phenomenologi-

.. "Dialogic Criticism." ContemporaryLiterary Theory.Ed. G. Douglas At-

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